Trump administration takes aim at satellite that measures carbon dioxide and crops

The Trump administration has asked NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellite missions, according to current and former NASA staffers. If the plans are carried out, one of the missions would be permanently terminated, because the satellite would burn up in the atmosphere.

The data the two missions collect is widely used, including by scientists, oil and gas companies and farmers who need detailed information about carbon dioxide and crop health. They are the only two federal satellite missions that were designed and built specifically to monitor planet-warming greenhouse gases.

It is unclear why the Trump administration seeks to end the missions. The equipment in space is state-of-the-art and is expected to function for many more years, according to scientists who worked on the missions. An official review by NASA in 2023 found that “the data are of exceptionally high quality,” and recommended continuing the mission for at least three years.

Both missions, known as the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, measure carbon dioxide and plant growth around the globe. They use identical measurement devices, but one device is attached to a stand-alone satellite while the other is attached to the International Space Station. The standalone satellite would burn up in the atmosphere, if NASA pursued plans to terminate the mission.

NASA employees who work on the two missions are making what the agency calls Phase F plans for both carbon-monitoring missions, according to David Crisp, a longtime NASA engineer who designed the instruments and managed the missions until he retired in 2022. Phase F plans lay out options for terminating NASA missions.

Crisp says NASA employees making those termination plans have reached out to him for his technical expertise. “What I have heard is direct communications from people who were making those plans, who weren’t allowed to tell me that that’s what they were told to do. But they were allowed to ask me questions,” Crisp says. “They were asking me very sharp questions. The only thing that would have motivated those questions was [that] somebody told them to come up with a termination plan.”

Three other academic scientists who use data from the missions confirmed that they, too, have been contacted with questions related to mission termination. All three asked for anonymity because they are concerned that speaking about the mission termination plans publicly could endanger the jobs of the NASA employees who contacted them.

Two current NASA employees also confirmed that NASA mission leaders were told to make termination plans for projects that would lose funding under President Trump’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year, or FY 2026, which begins October 1. The employees asked to remain anonymous, because they were told they would be fired if they revealed the request.

Congress funded the missions, and may fund them again

Presidential budget proposals are wish-lists that often bear little resemblance to final Congressional budgets. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory missions have already received funding from Congress through the end of the 2025 fiscal year, which ends September 30th. Draft budgets that Congress is currently considering for next year keep NASA funding basically flat. But it’s not clear if these specific missions will receive funding again, or if Congress will pass a budget before current funding expires on September 30.

Last week, NASA announced it will consider proposals from private companies and universities that are willing to take on the cost of maintaining the device that is attached to the International Space Station, as well as another device that measures ozone in the atmosphere.

In July, Congressional Democrats sent a letter to acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy warning his agency not to terminate missions that Congress has funded, and arguing that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and its director Russ Vought, are overstepping by directing NASA and other agencies to stop spending money that Congress has already appropriated.

In the past, Vought has been vocal about cutting what he sees as inappropriate spending on projects related to climate change. Before he joined the Trump administration, Vought authored sections of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 roadmap for remaking the federal government. In that document, Vought wrote that “the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding,” and argued that federal regulators should make it easier for commercial satellites to be launched.

The data from these missions are even more valuable than intended

The missions are called Orbiting Carbon Observatories because they were originally designed to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But soon after they launched, scientists realized that they were also accidentally measuring plant growth on Earth.

Basically, when plants are growing, photosynthesis is happening in their cells. And that photosynthesis gives off a very specific wavelength of light. The OCO instruments in space measure that light, all over the planet.

“NASA and others have turned this happy accident into an incredibly valuable set of maps of plant photosynthesis around the world,” explains Scott Denning, a longtime climate scientist at Colorado State University who worked on the OCO missions and is now retired. “Lo and behold, we also get these lovely, high resolution maps of plant growth,” he says. “And that’s useful to farmers, useful to rangeland and grazing and drought monitoring and forest mapping and all kinds of things, in addition to the CO2 measurements.”

For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and many private agricultural consulting companies use the data to forecast and track crop yield, drought conditions and more.

Carbon-monitoring satellites have revolutionized climate science

The carbon dioxide data that the instruments were originally designed to collect has revolutionized scientists’ understanding of how quickly carbon dioxide is collecting in the atmosphere.

That’s because measuring carbon dioxide with instruments in various locations on the Earth’s surface, as scientists have been doing since the 1950s, doesn’t provide information about the whole planet. Satellite data, on the other hand, covers the entire Earth.

And that data showed some surprising things. “Fifty years ago we thought the tropical forests were like a huge vacuum cleaner, sucking up carbon dioxide,” Denning explains. “Now we know they’re not.”

Instead, boreal forests in the northern latitudes suck up a significant amount of carbon dioxide, the satellite data show. And the patterns of which areas absorb the planet-warming gas, and how much they absorb, are continuously changing as the climate changes.

“The value of these observations is just increasing over time,” explains Anna Michalak, a climate researcher at Carnegie Science and Stanford University who has worked extensively on greenhouse gas monitoring from Space. “These are missions that are still providing critical information.”

It is expensive to end satellite missions

The cost of maintaining the two OCO satellite missions up in space is a small fraction of the amount of money taxpayers already spent to design and launch the instruments. The two missions cost about $750 million to design, build and launch, according to David Crisp, the retired NASA engineer, and that number is even higher if you include the cost of an initial failed rocket launch that sent an identical carbon dioxide measuring instrument into the ocean in 2009.

By comparison, maintaining both OCO missions in orbit costs about $15 million per year, Crisp says. That money covers the cost of downloading the data, maintaining a network of calibration sensors on the ground and making sure the stand-alone satellite isn’t hit by space debris, according to Crisp.

“Just from an economic standpoint, it makes no economic sense to terminate NASA missions that are returning incredibly valuable data,” Crisp says.

NASA’s recent call for universities and companies to potentially take over the cost of maintaining the OCO instrument attached to the International Space Station suggests the agency is also considering privatizing NASA science missions. Such partnerships raise a host of thorny questions, says Michalak, who has worked with private companies, noofit groups, universities and the federal government on greenhouse gas monitoring satellite projects.

“On the one hand the private sector is really starting to have a role,” Michalak says. In recent years, multiple private groups in the U.S. have launched satellites that measure methane, a potent planet-warming gas that is poorly monitored compared to carbon dioxide.

“Looking at it from the outside, it can look like the private sector is really picking up some of what the federal agencies were doing in terms of Earth observations,” she explains. “And it’s true that they’re contributing.” But, she says, “Those efforts would not be possible without this underlying investment from public funding.”